I am trying to decide whether or not Stanford will be a good fit for me considering my aspiration to get a masters in robotics (AI). Is Stanford a good school for computer science if I want to go into robotics? If not, any suggestions?
Yeah, there’s an AI track specifically in the CS major.
@robogirlcs First of all Stanford has an outstanding CS dept in terms of faculty and research reputation.
BUT the undergrad program is a mess now, CS enrollments have sky rocketed in the last 4 years and Stanford has not been able to manage it. The CS dept is smallest among the best CS programs at MIT/Cal/CMU. Currently there are around 850 undergrads declared as CS majors, that is about 300-400 per graduating class. The CS dept is just not equipped to handle it. The dept can take in about 100 students.
CS class are HUGE (some classes have around 700 - 800 students). The dept. is relying more on teaching staff and not tenure track professors to handle undergrad teaching. You can graduate with a CS degree without having taken a single CS class that is taught by a professor! With such large classes you are going to rely a lot on TAs some are good some or not. Most of the TAs have just taken the same class 1 or 2 quarters earlier. To some good students, this is not a problem they will do well, many others will struggle.
The CS Dept at Stanford will have to do something to alleviate the problem. Most likely it will be in the form of restricting the number of students majoring, and you may have to get a minimum GPA in some core classes before you are allowed to declare CS. There have been rumors about this for some time now, but nothing has happened. Can’t say this won’t happen soon, it might even happen starting with class of 2021. So what this means is that you could matriculate at Stanford thinking you are going to be studying CS and then be shut out because your GPA was not high in some core classes or there were better students than you. (Cal and CMU control the number of freshman admits to the CS major and the quality of students as well).
I took many robotics courses at Stanford. They have classes where students get into groups and do hands-on building of robotics projects. I recall after one class I spent the next two years refining my robot just because I became passionate about it. Look into course offerings such as Mechatronics and look into the curriculum offered for an Engineering Physics major.
Stanford students with interests in all disciplines are deciding they want/need at least one basic class in writing code. This has led to growth for introductory-level CS classes. You go past that first or second basic course and, in my experience, the level of instruction is excellent. Having taken many CS classes at Stanford I was more than satisfied. There was always opportunity for one-on-one help outside of class if a student wanted it.
I worked at Facebook and now Google writing code. There is an abundance of young Stanford grads at these two companies and just about every other company in Silicon Valley employing CS majors. These companies have grueling technical interviews to separate those who know their coding from those who don’t. The Stanford CS department must be doing something right.
My advice is to visit the campus and talk directly to current students. You will get much better feedback than reading one or two posts from a parent with an agenda such as the above poster or from myself.
Stanford is probably the best or close to it in the country… and you will be studying at a place which gave rise to Silicon Valley and is the startup capital of the world… the wall street of Silicon Valley sits on the north side of campus, Sand Hill Road… the opportunities at Stanford and Silicon Valley are simply unmatched imo… check out Berkeley too… their CS program is also top notched and you’re very close to Silicon Valley.